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Harold Searles
Harold F. Searles, M.D. (born 1918) [http://www.human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/pap129h.html Robert M Young. 'Harold Searles', The Human Nature Review (2005)]. Retrieved 07 July 2010. is one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specialising in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia. Harold Searles has the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients;http://www.pep-web.org/document.php and of being, in the words of Horacio Etchegoyen, president of the IPA, “not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician”.R. Horacio Etchegoyen, The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique(London 2005) p. 173 Life Searles was born in upstate New York. He attended Cornell University and Harvard Medical School before joining the US armed services in World War II. After the war he continued his psychiatric training at the Chestnut Lodge in Rockville, MD from 1949-1951, then at the Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic in Washington, DC from 1951-1952.APA Biographical Dictionary, 1977 In 1949 he started work at the luxurious private mental hospital Chestnut Lodge, Maryland where he stayed for the next fifteen years. His colleagues included Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, to whose philosophy of treatment he acknowledged his personal debt.Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Eric Fromm (Harvard 1991) p. 173 Searles and his wife Sylvia, retired to Davis, California.http://www.isps.org/modules/module_123/templates/publisher_template_detail_1.asp They have two sons and a daughter. Their daughter is actress Sandra Dickinson. Influence Arguably, Searles's work was largely ignored in the wider analytic community until the 1980s, when his radical views on the analyst's involvement through countertransference started to become more normative.David Sedgwick, Jung and Searles (1993) p. 7 Since then Jungians in particular have paid increasing attention to his work, linking his findings both to those of Jung and to the work of another maverick analyst, Robert Langs.Sedgwick, p. 1 Searles has also been associated with Donald W. Winnicott and Hans W. Loewald as psychoanalytic figures who all emphasised the importance of the part played in psychic developlment by the external environment.Carolyn Saari, The Environment (Columbia 2002) p. 7 On countertransference Searles has been singled out as one of the pioneer investigators of the potentially useful role of countertransference, and of the therapist's use of his/her own self in treatment.Lewis Aron, in Karen J. Mahoda, The Power of Countertransference (2004) p. x In his 1959 article 'Oedipal Love in the Countertransference', Searles wrote that he not only fell in Pygmalionesque love with his patients as they recovered, but also told them how he feltJanet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: the impossible profession (London 1988) p. 168n Searles argued that “the patient's self-esteem benefits greatly from his sensing that he (or she) is capable of arousing such responses in his analyst”Searles, quoted in Malcolm, p. 168n - a view which can be seen as a forerunner of intersubjective psychoanalysis with its emphasis on the spontaneous involvement of the therapist in terms of countertransference.Jan Grant and Jim Crawley, Transference and Projection (Buckingham 2002), p. 57 In his later paper of 1975, 'The Patient as Therapist to his Analyst', Searles argues that everybody has an urge to heal – something only distinguished in the psychotherapist in being tapped into formally.Neville Symington, Narcissism: A New Theory (London 2003), p. 36 Using the concept of what he called the patient's “unconscious therapeutic initiative”Searles, quoted in Patrick Casement, On Learning from the Patient (London 1999) p. 180 - a precursor of much later thinking on patient/analyst interaction - Searles suggested that psychological illness is related to a disturbance of this natural tendency to heal others; with the surprising corollary that to help a patient the analyst/therapist must really experience the patient as doing something therapeutic for them.Michael Parsons, 'The Dove that Returns, the Dove that Vanishes' (London 2000) p. 42 In his 1978-9 article, "Concerning Transference and Countertransference", Searles continued exploring intersubjectivity, building around his belief that “all patients...have the ability to 'read the unconscious' of the therapist”.Searles, quoted in R. M Young, Benign and virulent projective identification Searles emphasised the importance of the therapist's acknowledging the core of truth around which a patient's transference materialises.Josephine Klein, Jacob's Ladder (London 2003) p. 193 On relatedness Searles saw the schizophrenic individual as struggling with the question, not so much of how to relate, but of whether to relate to others. Searles however considered this merely as an exacerbated version of the same (if hidden) conflict that affects us all.Adam Phillips, Going Sane (London 2005), p. 172 Searles' interpersonal ideal - in the formulation of which he was indebted to Martin Buber - was of what he called a mature relatedness, something which involves connection without merging, or the loss of personal boundaries.Klein, p. 191 and p. 194 On "The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy" In an article of 1959, 'The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy', Searles examined six modes of interpersonal communication, arguing that “each of these techniques tends to undermine the other person's confidence in his own emotional reactions and his own perception of reality”.Searles quoted in R. D. Laing, Self and Others(Middlesex 1972), p. 139 Among these techniques were switching emotional wavelengths while discussing the same topic; and dealing with different topics (life and death/trivial) while remaining on the same wavelength. Such attempts at crazy-making were often applied by patients to therapists, who had the task of enduring them without retaliation. Searles added moreover that it was important for the therapist to survive their own wish to kill the patient.Scharff, in Martin S. Bergmann, Understanding dissidence and controversy in the history of psychoanalysis (2004) p. 319 Homo/transexuality Searles still holds the Freudian line that homosexuality is an abnormal behaviour. He considers transsexualism to be an abnormal behaviour. References Further reading * Searles, Harold F.. Countertransference and related subjects; selected papers., Publisher New York, International Universities Press, 1979, ISBN 0-8236-1085-3 * Searles, Harold F.: Collected papers on schizophrenia and related subjects, Imprint New York, International Universities Press, 1965, ISBN 0-8236-0980-4 * Searles, Harold F: My Work With Borderline Patients, Publisher: Jason Aronson, 1994, ISBN 1-56821-401-4 * Searles, Harold F.: The Nonhuman Environment in Normal Development and in Schizophrenia (New York, 1960) External links * Robert M. Young, 'The Viccissitudes of Transference and Countertransference: The Work of Harold Searles' * Ann-Louise S. Silver, 'Biography: Harold Searles' * Thomas H. Ogden, 'Reading Harold Searles' * Richard M. Waugaman, "Encyclopedia Article on Harold Searles" Category:American psychiatrists Category:American psychologists Category:Freudians Category:Psychoanalysts Category:Psychoanalytic theory Category:1918 births Category:Living people